21 May 2012

At my house we talk about What To Do in preparation for the big crash, the Collapse of the Economy As We Know It. Which we assume is not too distant; maybe next week like JH Kunstler is forever promising, or maybe next year, or maybe somehow not for ten or fifteen years.

11 May 2012

Our bees got through the winter pretty well and had a big population build up in March and April. When we took off the bottom board it was easy to see the mites that had dropped during winter, and I started noticing a lot of dead bees under the hive and bees unable to fly because their wings were mis-shaped or missing. Decided that we should treat for mites, and still not wanting to use chemical treatments I decided to go for the powdered-sugar treatment. A few bees inevitably get crushed when we start moving boxes around, but the bees seemed okay with the sugar treatment -- their first reaction looked like "hey, what are you doing?" and the second one seems like "oh, it's sugar...sugar is goood!" It took them just a few minutes to calm down after we put the hives back together -- they all were inside grooming each other and knocking off mites and putting away some of the good stuff. Though I'm not happy about the cornstarch in the sugar -- undoubtedly GMO corn as even I am not insane enough to use organic powdered sugar to dump by the cupful on my bees.